It was just after midnight, the 99-degree heat of June had turned to a chill, and Rob Chattler and his friend Rob Klockman were in the middle of a lonely stretch of highway, hunting for snakes. It was the height of the season, and they had been out every night for the past two weeks but had found nothing. “This is just a bad year for snakes, I guess,” Chattler said from the shotgun seat.

       People from all over the world come to this crook in the arm of West Texas where the town of Del Rio sits, and the Chihuahuan desert and Texas Hill Country don’t quite meet, to go snake hunting. It’s not as dramatic as it sounds; no snakes are actually killed.  Instead, hobbyists like Chattler drive down the side of the road at a crawl, shining a spotlight onto the roadside, hoping to catch a glimpse of any snakes before they slither away.

       When workers laid Highway 277 during the Great Depression they dynamited through the earth, making a level grade lined with walls of rocks, with cuts and ledges for snakes to hide. Customs and immigration checkpoints ring the roads here for around 25 miles in every direction outside Del Rio, and after passing through them I met Chattler 35 miles further down the highway. Klockman’s Jeep crept along the shoulder of the road, with Chattler’s hand-held spotlight tracing a path against the stones. The spotlight and the Jeep’s headlights were the only light for miles save for the stars and the orange half-moon descending toward the scrubland. People with places to go sped past us, shaking our tiny car.

       We were ready to go home when we came upon four glowing green eyes on the rock ledge. They belonged to two kittens, not more than a few weeks old. “Their mother probably left them out here when she went to get food,” Chattler said. “They’ll never
survive.” They looked like they had been well cared for by their mother. They dug their claws into Chattler’s hand as he dropped them into a cooler in the backseat he had brought in case he wanted to keep any of the snakes he found. “I had to do that,” he said. “No way they would’ve made it out here. I’ll tell you what, though. When she gets back and finds them gone, that is going to be one pissed-off mama.”
      
       The line separating the United States from Mexico, order and law from
corruption and chaos, this world from that, is breached by $2. Two dollars handed to a toll collector on the International Bridge deposits you in Ciudad Acuña. Two dollars, the cost of a torta lunch washed down with a can of Tecate with a wedge of lime from one of the rubber tablecloth street-side restaurantes there, plus two minutes on the bridge over the Rio Grande, is the line separating Acuña from Del Rio, its benefactor, tormentor, prodigal son, and twin sister city on the other side. People in both towns talk of living in one city, but each is more like the worm-holed version of the other, where Main Street, U.S.A. gives way to streets protected by mongrel dogs, grade school-age children selling sticks of gum to pedestrians, and piss-drunk Americans stumbling out of roadhouse saloons, plastic cups of beer in hand.

       I had come to the border to see how people on both sides were dealing with the national debate over immigration. Two thousand miles away, what happens here and other places along the thin line separating these two countries is the political blood sport of the day. In December 2005, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would extend a double-layered security fence for 700 miles along the border. One of the bill’s chief backers, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), called those who cross that line illegally “a scourge that threatens the very future of our nation.” Plans to legalize those who are already here and create a way for others to come here legally and safely (since increased border patrols started in the mid-1990s, more than 3,000 migrants have died in transit) have stalled until better border security is in place. In May, President Bush announced the deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops at high traffic spots on the border (including the Del Rio-Acuña area) to temporarily stem the tide until civilian contractors could be brought in to take their place. In the meantime, Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry has started Operation Linebacker, which calls for $6 million to fund, among other things, a “virtual wall” of webcams so Lone Star State citizens can monitor the hills and deserts along the Rio Grande from their PCs and alert the authorities when anything is found to be amiss.

       Chris Simcox, who founded the vigilante group the Minutemen to patrol sections of the border, told Fox News in April, “We’re being attacked by people from a foreign country.” He declared, with his 600 or so armed volunteers, a war on illegal immigration. If there is a war going on, an assault to American life and culture, this 2,000-mile strip of sand is the battleground. Whatever happens, it is here that the issue will be decided. This is the Minutemen’s Gettysburg, their Waterloo, their Lexington and Concord, their Armistice and their Alamo.

       At one end of the bridge that binds together—or keeps apart—Acuña and Del Rio sits a statue of Tlaloc, the Aztec god of rain and fertility. In ancient times, the locals sacrificed their children to her. She is squarely on the Mexican side of the bridge, her steep stone steps fenced off to keep away vandals. Further down on the bridge, above where the waters of what the Americans call the Rio Grande and the Mexicans call the Rio Bravo flow into one another, stand two more stone icons, representations more of current political realities than ancient religious rite: twin eagles side by side, the American one regally resting on its laurel branch, the identical Mexican one with the snake of tyranny in its beak.

       Each year, the mayors of Del Rio and Acuña come together here for a ceremonial hug—“the Abrazo,” they call it. It is preceded by a festival, complete with folkloric dancing on the bridge and a parade that organizers claim is the only one in the world to cross international borders. For decades, the parade began in Del Rio one year, Acuña the next; after 9/11, however, U.S. Customs began requiring that all vehicles, even parade floats, be subject to inspection. Now the party always starts in the north and rumbles downward.

       Two nations and two cities coming together to show their affection for one another is central to how people who live here conceive of their relationship. This is a world surrounded by immigration checkpoints approximately 25 miles from the border on every road, even the ones that lead into Mexico. The result is an enclosed universe entirely under government control, one where no one can get very far away without first proving who they are, where they come from, and where they are going. Even if you’re able to cross the border, you’ll be stopped at a checkpoint and asked for identification. So people who live here talk of the two towns being one city, or one world really, kept apart from the rest of the world by a kind of 25-mile-radius no man’s land. “For us, it’s like the border isn’t even there,” said Linda Henderson, the president of the Del Rio Chamber of Commerce. “People in Washington see the border as something all new and crucial, but we’ve been dealing with it forever.”